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Week 5
If “form is the creation of an appetite in the mind of the auditor, and the adequate satisfying of that appetite," then is it possible that form can be dangerous? Can it lead to the blase? The trite, the meaningless, the "oh I've seen this before" (35)? *Secondly, why do we have these expectations? Are they enculturated or intrinsic? *Burke writes that: “Every dissonant chord cries for its solution, and whether the musician resolves or refuses to resolve this dissonance into the chord which the body cries for, he is dealing in human appetities” This is the problem, though – have we been enculturated in these musical matters or are they intrinsic in us and thus universal? Does a minor triad make everyone sad, pensive, reflective… or just us Westeners? Or some portion of us? *Burke writes that music doesn't cater to the psychology of "information" as well as the psychology of "form" - and Carroll also notes this in Burke. But does this mean that music cannot relay information at all? Or a different sort of information? American folk music, for example, carries historical tidbits and so on in its lyrics... or the protest singer-songwriters like Phil Ochs of the late 60s... but Burke is talking about a non-lyrical music. Have we lost something by letting our music become inundated with words (38)? *art as a dream...“Thus it is right that art should be called a ‘waking dream’” - and the Zizek quip I love to quote: "reality must be an illusion in order for it to function as reality" - What I am saying here is that I disagree with Burke. Art is an integral part of our reality and though it may help us reach peaks of euphoria or inspiration or help us crawl back to a sort of Lacanian Real, it is still very much a material element of life and to think otherwise is to relegate it to some hippie-Platonic-Ionian-Bohemian position *that being said, Carroll's notes on Burke's thoughts about the musical "event" are important here - because in the musical event, the concert, the performance... this is a premeditated event, it is scripted... it is unlike a dream entirely, unless there is room for improvisation, even aleatoricism *But here we have, in other words:“It is, rather, the audience which dreams, while the artist oversees the conditions which determine this dream” (40) - this gives much power to the artist. I like Burke, here. But what if the artist is not careful - then we see something like Justin Bieber and his record company goons ideologically brainwashing millions of little children, right? Or no. I mean to say that Burke assumes the musician is already a rhetorician, which is true historically (as composers were trained in classical rhetoric and applied it to composition, Burmeister, etc.) but this may not be true even in Burke's time, and especially not now... *What are the "rudimentary laws of composition"? Burke is being evasive, maybe. He wants to talk about a rhetoric of music but he won't go there. Carroll doesn't want to say too much about it, either, though there's mention. *I like this line, about art once being "an added factor to life" - I think thatart is that secret place where we go to fulfill our fantasies, our illusions... not the experience of illusion itself . *And I like this“And so the encounter with music is the music itself: we are part of it in so intimate a way as to blur the sound as having any source other than our own sensitivities before, during, and after the event itself.” - This is problematic for digital music, which is replayed constantly, transmitted, turned into data, mixed up, mashed... there is no final instance of music. Or is there? Is the physical instrumentation of a piece its 'end'? *Carroll being interesting for a bit: "...music is a medial bridge between the man-made phenomenon of the reproduced sound and the recalled lives of others, ghosts that arise out of thin air like the wavering tinny sound of a Chopin nocturne on an early wax cylinder.” - this almost approximates what I'm getting at with game music, about its ability to world (verb) or reworld or to carry worlds, or maybe ghosts of worlds? I'd hate to go there, but then Baudrillard, the ghost is like the illusion, or maybe the Lacanian reflection, the narcissistic recreation of our own universe... *On the thought of universality... what if we're living in a multiverse? What would multiversality mean? I'm going to coin that one. *I disagree with this stand-point (not Carroll's own but he's explaining this rift):"As Burke puts it in his first Dial piece: “Tone seems to share the pudency of pigment at telling a story, or at least at avowedly doing so” (539). Just so: like visual art, music’s force lay outside having to subject itself to the verbal. Burke’s qualifier “avowedly” reminds us that we can always say that a piece of music “reminds” us of something, or “seems to represent” something. But its intentionality is, according to those in the purist camp, anti-intentional––that is, without explicit reference to the pre-existing real.” - Music must be an explicit reference to the real... it is the real. It is the vibration of the real. *Also, the "subject," and how music for Burke is creation in itself, that even in one work of music the theme can repeat itself and this is somehow congruent with musicality (not so in literature, for example...) - But can music lead to the subjectification of the audience? I mean this... in a neutral sense, but ... or the psychology of form itself, it leads to viewing audience as necessarily engaged... what if we are discussing, as Burke does, propoganda, for example? *Hubler's "rhetoric of technology" is interesting, viewing our interractions with technology as a speaker-audience relationship - we, the speaker, make the technology (audience) speak... the technology then becoms a speaker. This is interesting in terms of an instrument. The instrument must speak. Many musicians consider their instrument a part of themself, an extension of their voice, or their body. Most become sentimentally attached: "oh, this guitar was my grandfather's, it was made out of the wood of the tree under which his dog was buried, it was built in Finland in the 60s by my luthier cousins" or some other story. *Is Hubler addressing a sort of Marxist "ideology" or is he just making things up as he goes (I don't mind either way)?